This section, continuing the WiLL January issue dialogue between historian Watanabe Soki and Professor Fukui Yoshitaka, argues that mainstream Japanese war historiography ignores crucial international contexts: the punitive Morgenthau Plan and Harry Dexter White’s role in stripping Germany of wealth, the terror this created for Japan in contemplating unconditional surrender, the close alignment between Stalin and Mao Zedong, and the disastrous influence of U.S. “China Hands” on American China policy.
The speakers maintain that post–World War I conflicts became “punitive wars” in which the U.S. framed its campaigns as just wars of democracy versus evil, sliding from limited interstate war into total war and blurring the line between combatants and civilians, while Japan retained a more traditional view and did not order civilian guerrilla warfare.
They criticize Hatano Sumio’s Ending the War and much of Japanese scholarship as “foxholed” and Japan-centric—focused narrowly on domestic documents and personal relationships, treating Japan as uniquely evil and ignoring Allied atrocities, occupation policy, and global power politics.
In the final part, they extend this analysis to the current Ukraine war, offering a strongly opinionated reading of Trump–Putin relations, NATO’s dilemmas, Ukrainian public opinion, Zelensky’s political fate, and the potential rise of Valerii Zaluzhnyi, arguing that once wars start they are extraordinarily difficult to stop and that Japan must study such conflicts through a truly global, multi-archival lens rather than through a one-sided “apologetic” narrative.

This is a continuation of the previous section.
It is an important article that every Japanese citizen and indeed people all over the world should read.

Watanabe
Hoover argued that if the Morgenthau Plan were applied to Germany, the United States would have to go on supporting the country forever, and he succeeded in bringing it to a halt.
The punitive postwar policies of the Allies toward Germany require historical scrutiny.
White and others used monetary policy itself, centered on him, in order to strip Germany of its wealth.
It was also White who handed over the printing plates for occupation currency to the Soviet Union.
The Soviets printed occupation currency as much as they pleased.
The Allied plunder of Germany’s wealth was that extreme.
In Ending the War not one word is said about the Morgenthau Plan or about White.
Japan knew about the brutal occupation policies imposed on Germany.
That is why it hesitated to accept unconditional surrender.
It was the terror of not knowing what might be done to it.
Fukui
The Japanese military also understood that soldiers were being massacred on the front lines, so it was only natural that they should resolve that the home islands must be defended at all costs.
As the U.S. forces occupied islands in the Pacific, not only did Japanese soldiers fight to the last man, but many Japanese women also killed themselves.
There is no doubt that there was a deep-seated fear of being raped by American soldiers.
For on the European front it was said that Soviet soldiers raped all German women, and at the same time, rapes committed by American soldiers were also frequent.
Watanabe
Ending the War states that “unconditional surrender was a matter of course.”
That is proof that he has not looked at American sources.
At the Casablanca Conference (1943), FDR suddenly demanded unconditional surrender.
Later Churchill testified that it was “a bolt from the blue,” and FDR himself admitted that “it was a spur-of-the-moment idea.”
He said that he got the idea from the claim that, in the Civil War, General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate Army had surrendered unconditionally, but this is a sloppy account.
The reason is that in Lee’s case it was not unconditional surrender.
Many Confederate soldiers were farmers.
They negotiated that their horses should not be confiscated, since once the war was over they would become farm horses, and General Ulysses Grant of the Union Army agreed.
It was not a complete unconditional surrender.
Japan’s hesitation to accept unconditional surrender was only natural.
The discussion in Ending the War gives the impression of being empty theorizing that ignores diplomatic documents.

Fukui
Another strange point in Ending the War is that it portrays Stalin and Mao Zedong as if they had been at odds with each other.
That is contrary to the facts.
Professor Michael Sheng of the University of Akron in the United States, who is originally from China, has made it clear that Stalin and Mao were firmly joined.
For example, immediately after the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact, which threw leftists around the world into confusion, the official Comintern journal published an interview with Mao Zedong in which he praised the pact and condemned not Germany but British and French imperialism.
Watanabe
In 1945, the American “China Hands”—what in Japan are called the “China School”—such as John Carter Vincent, kept telling the State Department in Washington that in China it would be possible to build a state in which the Kuomintang would be at the center, with the Chinese Communist Party beneath it, forming a united front.
In fact, in August 1945 Mao Zedong flew from Yan’an to Chongqing to negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek.
Mao, who had never flown before, was terrified of being assassinated.
Even so, on Stalin’s orders Mao went to Chongqing at the risk of his life.
It was also in order to please the China Hands.
Fukui
Mao thought that the greatest man of all was Stalin and that he himself came next.
After Stalin’s death, he saw himself as the greatest.
Mao took no notice whatsoever of Nikita Khrushchev, who became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party after Stalin’s death and criticized Stalin.
Watanabe
There is no doubt that Mao moved in accordance with Stalin’s instructions.
Fukui
It was also on Stalin’s orders that Manchuria was brought under control.
At first, the idea was to turn Manchuria into a communist region and confront Chiang Kai-shek.
However, after Japan’s surrender, because the United States did not adequately support Chiang Kai-shek, Mao was able to win an easy victory.
I suspect that Chiang Kai-shek later regretted not having joined hands with Japan.
Watanabe
The American China Hands did far more to side with the Chinese Communist Party than one might have imagined.
Fukui
In the United States, propaganda by the China Hands took hold that Mao was a nationalist agrarian reformer rather than a communist.
Chiang Kai-shek, on the other hand, was regarded as a corrupt dictator.
Realist General Albert Wedemeyer, commander on the China front, continued to call for support of the Kuomintang after returning home, but his former superior, Secretary of State George Marshall, who had been influenced by the China Hands, would not listen to him.
Watanabe
Wedemeyer understood that unless the United States committed regular army forces rather than just the Marines, it would be impossible to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from taking control of China.
But from the perspective of the White House, China at that time was of little importance.
Germany was the principal enemy, and everything was geared toward figuring out how to defeat Germany.
The United States had absolutely no intention of sending troops to Manchuria.
In the Hull Note, it demanded a complete Japanese withdrawal from China, but it merely wanted to anger and provoke Japan.
It gave no thought to how a state would be built in Manchuria after Japan’s withdrawal.
Fukui
American foreign policy is heavily influenced by public opinion.
Once their main enemy Germany had been defeated, ordinary Americans would oppose their sons going off to fight and die in Japan proper or in China, and so it would have been difficult to conduct full-scale operations.
That factor also worked in favor of the Chinese Communist forces.

Watanabe
As you pointed out in our coauthored book A “Dark-Hearted” Modern History (Business-sha), Professor Fukui, the ways in which wars begin and end have become extremely peculiar since the First World War.
Wars can no longer be ended in the old way, by ceding territory and paying reparations.
They have become ferociously punitive.
Fukui
Japan failed to catch up with this shift in the concept of war after the First World War.
Germany fought to the bitter end out of fear that, once it surrendered, its people would be reduced to slavery.
However, I think it has also become clear that Japan’s own view of war changed gradually.
Japan knew it could not win, but it tried to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy and to secure surrender under somewhat more favorable conditions.
In fact, the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa shocked the American forces.
Watanabe
That is precisely why the United States had no intention whatsoever of fighting a decisive battle on the Japanese home islands.
There were plans on paper, but no will to carry them out.
Fukui
In the first place, there is no such thing as a “good” or “bad” war.
The American view of war, however, is that of a kind of “civil war.”
Watanabe
Without invoking the notion of a “just war,” the United States simply cannot wage war.
Fukui
In that framework, one’s own side becomes the police and the enemy becomes the criminals.
From the limited wars between sovereign states that had prevailed until then, the First World War turned into a total war between the “just” forces of democracy and the “evil” forces of oppression.
In such a situation, the distinction between soldiers and noncombatants becomes blurred.
Yet even in the Second World War, Japan did not employ guerrilla tactics.
The military did not order the remaining civilians to take up arms as guerrillas and continue fighting after the army surrendered.
The conceptual line between soldiers and the general populace remained in place.
Watanabe
Japan held fast to a traditional view of war.
Fukui
China, by contrast, attacked with soldiers and civilian guerrillas acting as one.
Under such circumstances, you end up suspecting that even the old woman walking down the street might be a guerrilla, and you start killing civilians who are not guerrillas.
Many of the incidents that are described as “massacres” on the China front were probably of this kind.
It is said that after the Korean War the American military changed its thinking.
Because the U.S. military had never fought such a war, it had previously regarded the harsh battles fought by the German army against Soviet partisans on the Eastern Front as war crimes.
But after gaining experience of guerrilla warfare on the Korean Peninsula, its view of the German army changed, and that helped pave the way for West German rearmament.

Watanabe
When we look back at history, we are appalled by American stupidity.
One cannot help asking, “Were you really that ignorant?”
Fukui
The same is true for the postwar period.
The United States was not as admirable as people think.
By August, confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was already decisive, and in the American homeland the New Dealers had been driven from power, yet in the early period of the occupation of Japan, New Dealers held the reins at GHQ and plunged Japan into chaos.
However, with the intensification of U.S.–Soviet confrontation and the Communist takeover of the Chinese mainland, the Truman administration had no choice but to support Japan.
Had China been unified under Chiang Kai-shek, there might have been U.S.–China cooperation and, as in the “Peace of Carthage,” Japan might have been turned into a purely agricultural country.
Watanabe
It is one of history’s ironies.
Fukui
I repeat: Japan cannot wage war according to its own convenience.
Japan is not so important a country in the world.
Watanabe
Ending the War is also written on the premise that Japan could have stopped the war when it wanted to.
But Japan’s convenience had nothing to do with it.
From my perspective, if the Japanese side had been capable of making firm decisions, there might have been ways of bringing the war to an end under better conditions, but in reality there were no such options.
Fukui
Ending the War and many other Japanese historical works devote many pages to the human relationships among people within Japan, but I do not think those relationships had such a decisive impact on the outcome of the war.
Japanese documents have been studied thoroughly, but that alone makes it hard to grasp the essence of the last great war.
Watanabe
The Japanese historical world, starting with figures like Hando Kazutoshi, Hata Ikuhiko, and Hosaka Masayasu, remains stuck in its foxholes.
It refuses to turn its gaze to the world beyond Japan.
Researchers bury themselves in Japanese sources and confine themselves to apportioning blame to the government and the military.
Japan at the time was not the main actor on the world stage but merely a supporting player.
Fukui
In the end, what we have is nothing more than a “reversed imperial-history view,” in which only Japan is evil.

Watanabe
Bringing wars to an end is difficult.
The idea that “if only we had done this or that, we could have ended it sooner” can easily become empty speculation, as we can see from the current war in Ukraine.
Russia wants to end it.
The Ukrainian people, of course, want it to stop.
The United States also wants to bring it to an end.
Yet the war cannot be stopped.
Once a war has begun, it is truly difficult to bring it to a halt.
That said, there is no doubt that there has been some gradual progress.
Trump and Putin are firmly aligned.
In that sense, it is not in Putin’s interest for the Trump administration to be weakened.
For that reason, Putin may be thinking of ending the war in Ukraine before the midterm elections and making Trump into the president who stopped the war.
Fukui
How do you see the decline in Trump’s approval ratings as related to this?
Watanabe
The economy is doing well, so I do not think that is the cause.
The reason must be that he has not yet managed to bring about a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.
There is also media-driven manipulation of impressions, but my impression is that figures such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—neoconservatives within the Trump administration—are pulling him back.
Fukui
But in midterm elections the president’s party almost always loses.
It is rare not to lose.
There is no point in worrying too much about that.
Watanabe
Because of neocon maneuvering, the second U.S.–Russia summit in Budapest has also been postponed, but I take a positive view of this.
The reason is that no acceptable “landing point” has yet been found.
I think Putin absolutely will not accept a Korean War–style solution.
If it followed the Korean pattern, the region would remain a conflict zone forever.
What Putin wants is to make Ukraine a neutral country.
On that point, he will never compromise.
The defeat of the Ukrainian army is inevitable, no matter how they struggle.
The Azov Battalion has been deployed in Pokrovsk, the fiercely contested area in eastern Ukraine, but it is completely encircled by Russian forces.
Resupply is not functioning properly.
By the time this issue of the magazine hits the stands, the town will probably have fallen.
Fukui
The Ukrainian army is short of manpower and in effect has collapsed.
Watanabe
At an earlier stage Trump said that, if the Ukrainian army were ever to find itself encircled by Russian forces, he wanted them to be rescued.
This time he has said nothing.
He may be waiting for the collapse of the Ukrainian military—or, more broadly, of the Zelensky administration.
One more thing: it has been decided that nearly half of the U.S. troops stationed in Romania will be withdrawn.
For NATO it is a serious headache.
Fukui
The Ukrainian people, too, have had enough of war.
According to the American polling company Gallup, in a July 2025 survey, 69 percent of Ukrainians said they supported ending the war as quickly as possible through negotiations, while only 24 percent said they supported “fighting on until victory.”
In 2022, more than 70 percent answered that they would fight on until victory, so the figures have completely reversed.
The question is whether the Zelensky administration will collapse, or whether Zelensky will be able to step down quietly by choosing not to run in the next presidential election.
Watanabe
Ukrainian lawmakers and former lawmakers have begun openly criticizing the Zelensky administration.
Until now they could not do such a thing.
For example, MP Mariana Bezuhla has said, “Zelensky is now openly lying about the situation in Pokrovsk and Kupiansk.
Our decisions are being taken on the basis of this rotten lie that reeks of the corrupt staff of the General Staff.”
Former MP Ihor Mosiychuk has stated that “the Ukrainian defensive line in Pokrovsk has been destroyed, and the town of Myrnohrad has been placed under Russian encirclement.”
It is now only a matter of time.
Fukui
It is said that a strong candidate for the next president is Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
He clashed with Zelensky, who was fixated on a hard-line stance, and was dismissed, and is now ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Watanabe
There are also reports that the FBI is helping to uncover corruption around Zelensky.
Since it appears that the Trump administration is becoming serious about removing Zelensky, the possibility of a coup has emerged.
In any case, we intend to keep a close eye on how the war in Ukraine develops from here on.